redshift

We were all more or less thieves, at Lant Street. But we were the kind of thief that rather eased the dodgy deed along, than did it.

Fingersmith, by Sarah Waters, is a melodramatic romance set in Victorian England, with a twisting plot full of thieving, betrayal, sex, and confusion. I’m still, at time of writing, trying to work out what I really think about it. It’s convoluted, lengthly, and yes, very, very full of melodrama. It also ticks a large number of boxes for me personally — namely, the core relationship is a lesbian one, the shifting of various people’s identities throughout the book is intriguing, fact and fiction get wildly confused, and it’s about con artists.

The melodrama and plot twists, as well as the style in which the story is told, feel like a very conscious reference to and play on tropes of Victorian literature itself – and the book is partially concerned with said literature, too. This bit is where I begin to get confused, and feel unsure of my response to the book; on the one hand, I certainly tore through it fast enough, but on the other, parts of it were on the repetitive and heavy-handed side, and to me, it didn’t always quite work. I always wanted to know what would happen next, but I did not always lose myself in the story, and I didn’t always entirely buy into what it was trying to do. Specific examples are more difficult as the plot twists are important to the story and I wouldn’t want to undermine that for anyone planning to give it a read.

I can’t recommend this book as highly as I would some of the others I’ve reviewed here, but I will say that if you’re interested in the sorts of things the novel deals with then you might want to give it a try; it didn’t all quite fall together for me, but I suspect that views are going to vary a lot on this one. And I’d certainly consider looking at other Sarah Waters novels myself on the strength of this one.